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Reviewed by:
  • Samuel Rawson Gardiner and the Idea of History by Mark Nixon
  • Michael Bentley (bio)
Samuel Rawson Gardiner and the Idea of History, by Mark Nixon; pp. xiv + 205. Woodbridge and Rochester: Royal Historical Society and The Boydell Press, 2011, £50.00, $90.00.

A postmodern age has had the paradoxical effect of sending present day historians back to reconsider some of the great nineteenth-century historians who pioneered the idea of narrative history and thereby revealed interesting cross-currents between text and presupposition. Mark Nixon’s mission may be seen as a poststructuralist attempt to rescue Samuel Rawson Gardiner, the celebrated historian of seventeenth-century England, from modern commentators who have, he alleges, reduced Gardiner to a mere historian of politics and war or cast him as a Darwinist acolyte concerned to make a science out of the historical enterprise. The project has some plausibility, though the variant of it presented here is unlikely to win many friends. Had Gardiner himself been in a position to read it, he would doubtless have tricycled away in a fury.

Nixon has three things to say, one of them substantive and two methodological. His substantive point is that Gardiner should be regarded as a Fichtean Idealist, with the corollary that his oeuvre is better viewed as a compound history of ideas rather than a treatment of politics: hence the title of Nixon’s volume. Gardiner read Johann Gottlieb Fichte, clearly, as did most intellectuals of his generation, though he did not, as they often did, study in Germany. To assert that philosophical Idealism had some influence among British historians pushes, therefore, at an open door. But Nixon wants to go much further by turning the Fichtean (rather than Hegelian) understanding of dialectic, which Nixon unnervingly believes to be an adjective, into a mantra for his monograph, couching Gardiner’s explanations in Fichtean terms and turning his hero into an intellectual historian. “For Gardiner, the study of the past must be based upon the history of ideas” (120). What Gardiner himself tended to say was that the study of the past rested on knowledge of facts revealed by systematic enquiry among primary sources. Nixon gives himself a hard hill to climb, therefore, in trying to make that disposition sound secondary to German metaphysics.

His methodological points are designed to help him climb it. He swipes some other commentators out of the way in a troubling abbreviation of Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. [End Page 166] Pocock, and John Dunn, an inaccurate one of John Burrow, and a risible one of Hayden White. They all got it wrong, apparently, by focusing on context rather than text, by choosing questionable contexts in the first place, and by failing to prosecute the close reading that Nixon is about to supply. Plainly influenced by Mark Bevir, Nixon wants to assert the arbitrariness of context unless one lights on “adjacent discourses” (162), which some of us believed Skinner and the others to be doing anyway. These two new mantras, close reading and adjacent discourses, form the central methodological foundations for Nixon’s study, and there are problems with each of them.

Nixon feels it unnecessary to contextualize Gardiner in simple fashion by relating him to what other historians of his generation were writing about. In his case it may be as well. He can just about get away with describing Leopold von Ranke as part of a late nineteenth-century German generation since the old man died as late as 1886. He cannot get away with describing Reinhold Niebuhr as an historian and catapulting him into the early nineteenth century, presumably through a confusion with Barthold Georg Niebuhr. Indeed a sense of contextual remoteness pervades the study and leaves one uncomfortable with the perspective presented here. Nixon is right, for example, to dwell on the importance of the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, but to describe it as “the last great theological controversy to excite all of parliament” will surprise anyone who knows about revision of the Prayer Book in the 1920s (77). Instead of pursuing context in this simple sense, Nixon chose to find his adjacent discourses inside Gardiner’s texts through the aforementioned close...

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